Hortonworks announced a massive funding round led by new investors Tenaya Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from our existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Yahoo!.

The new funding injection of $50 million puts Hortonworks in the center of the conversation in the big data space and silences the rumors about any acquisition. According to CEO Rob Bearden “the market reception of our business model and strategy of ensuring 100% open source Apache Hadoop becomes an enterprise viable data platform is resonating strongly with the market. This includes a rapidly growing number of Hortonworks customers – 100+ and counting – but just as importantly, a broader ecosystem of partners that includes Microsoft, Teradata, Rackspace and many others who have chosen to partner closely with us on this journey to deliver a modern data architecture to our collective customers.”

I interviewed Rob Bearden last year at the Hadoop Summit #hadoopsummit. He talks about the opportunity for Hortonworks and the Hadoop ecosystem. SiliconANGLE @theCUBE will be there this week for 2 days of live coverage to extract the signal from the noise. We will discuss the financing and the growth prospects of Hortonworks and others like Cloudera.

According to Hortonworks blog post on the news the funding will focus on both scaling global field operations as well as further investing in our engineering organization. Bearden comments in his blog post “it (the funding) will enable us to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Hadoop projects. This starts with the YARN based initiatives but also extends to Security, Data Lifecycle Management, Streaming and beyond. Those investments will continue to fulfill enterprise requirements and fuel greater enterprise adoption in the coming months.”

The news speaks to the health of the Hadoop ecosystem and more importantly about the speculation about the future of Hortonworks. Many in the industry were saying that Hortonworks was primed to be target for an acquisition. This funding gives Hortonworks a viable option to maintain their independence as a growing venture and gives them an alternative to a merger or acquisition.

Great news for the open source Hadoop ecosystem as both Hortonworks and Cloudera both are doing extremely well in the marketplace.

We’ll be discussing this in detail at Hadoop Summit in San Jose this week where Hortonworks and Yahoo will be hosting 2,500+ attendees and more than 65 sponsors to celebrate the modern era of cloud and big data infrastructure.